Velocity's Edge Podcast

When leadership is struggling with organizational dysfunction that stems from resource constraints, they tend to see teams in conflict: product versus engineering, sales versus operations, etc. They might assume the solution involves coaching, restructuring reporting lines, adjusting compensation models, or hiring more diplomacy-minded managers. But as EPSD’s Nicko Goncharoff and Nick Selby have l...

Many organizations hire CISOs expecting them to be security experts who can implement controls and prevent breaches. But as Dr. Pablo Breuer learned through 22 years in Navy cyber operations and leadership roles spanning NSA red teams to Fortune 50 financial firms, the fundamental challenge isn't technical — it's that most companies don't understand what they actually need from a CISO in the first...

When Peat Bakke sits down for breakfast with engineering leaders, the conversation inevitably turns to the same frustrating pattern: talented people leave, and with them goes critical context about why systems work the way they do. Not just the technical details—those live in the code—but the reasoning behind architectural choices, the problems those choices solved, and crucially, the alternatives...

Most engineering leaders think institutional knowledge loss is an inevitable cost of growth. They see departing employees take critical context with them—why certain processes exist, what problems they solve, how trade-offs were evaluated—and assume the solution involves better handoff documentation or knowledge transfer sessions. But as Thomas Dullien and Chris Swan learned through building and s...

Most engineering leaders think velocity problems are technology problems. They see slow deployments and assume the solution involves better CI/CD pipelines, more developers, or migrating to microservices. But as Sarah Wells discovered during her transformation of the Financial Times , the biggest constraints aren't in your codebase—they're in your org chart. The FT's journey from 12 releases per y...

When everything's on fire, most organizations make a critical mistake: they treat the crisis as the exception rather than the expectation. They burn out their teams in marathon response sessions, fail to automate routine failures, and never learn from the incidents that keep repeating. The companies that survive and thrive are those that understand a fundamental truth: if your business is growing,...

Most organizations think of security communications as crisis management: what to say when something goes wrong. But waiting until an incident occurs to build relationships, establish trust, and create communication channels severely limits your response options.  Security communications isn't episodic. It's strategic. Every interaction with security researchers, every statement about your securit...

If you're leading a profitable, cash-flow-positive business, you've probably watched technical debt pile up—those accumulated consequences of choosing quick fixes over well-designed, long-term solutions. Maybe your teams built features fast to hit the market, taking shortcuts along the way. Some executives think tech debt is like healthy corporate debt with low interest. It's not. It's more like c...

In the debut of Velocity's Edge podcast, host Nicko Goncharoff speaks with Engineering Effectiveness Lead Consultant Sarah Wells about the importance of strategy to engineering effectiveness. Sarah is a recognized leader in software engineering, with a focus on microservices, DevOps, and engineering enablement. She played a pivotal role at the Financial Times, where she helped scale deployments fr...